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Life in da big city, and in Saint Paul as well.
A SEVERE WINTER STORM WARNING HAS BEEN ISSUED ..
Have they ever issued a Humorous Winter Storm Warning? It’s always a very severe affair, never something lighthearted that we can all get into. You know, the kind of thing that goes down before the commercial break on the evening nooze, delivered by the guy with the soothing voice of pale male authority and the woman wearing hair with tunnels that neatly reveal her big earrings:
It came as expected, with all the usual omens. The driving wind out of the east picked up right on schedule with a chill that ran under the skin and deep into the bones and finally forcing its way into the subconscious. This wasn’t an ordinary storm. It was the first big storm of the winter season. We spent six months unpreparing for this.
Saint Paul has always been comfortable as just another Midwestern city in a way that Minneapolis cannot be. Our younger, more outgoing sister to the west has always had the bright lights of the big city in her eyes, and yearned to be a great beacon out on the prairie.
Not Saint Paul. We see a beacon on the prairie as pointless, something that can only serve to confuse the waterfowl. We have more in common with Mankato than Chicago, more to talk about with Des Moines than New York. Saint Paul is all of these, pushed together, as if it is a dozen cities with one mayor. It’s something like a giant hotdish or booya where everyone is invited to bring their own ingredients.
The air was heavy on Monday, the grey colored cold that rides like a burden on your back. It was a car-free day for me, so I had to walk back through this from a series of appointments on the Hill. Saint Paul is a city of 6 1/2 hills, but each one is always “The Hill”. Burdens like November air are somehow lighter when you can convince yourself they are being shared by friends, or at least a familiar terrain.
I’ve been hearing for twenty years that the future of the USofA belonged to “knowledge workers” – people who are visionaries who break outside of the usual boxes we live our lives in.
Sad that it’s all bullshit.
Barataria - The work of Erik Hare 